About this episode

The episode explores M R James's ghost story about a haunted dolls' house and its eerie occurrences.

Kindly commissioned and sponsored by Gavin Critchley for his friend Victoria, a lover of dolls' houses... A collector buys a Gothic dolls' house for sixty guineas — a museum piece, the dealer calls it, and means it more than he says. Six feet of Strawberry Hill in miniature: a chapel, a stable block, a drawer of tiny embroidered clothes. He spends a happy evening setting its rooms in order, delighted with his find. There's no clock within earshot — none on the stair, none in the stable, none in the distant church tower. And yet, at one in the morning, a bell tolls once. "The Haunted Dolls' House" was first published in the Empire Review in February 1923, and later collected in M. R. James's A Warning to the Curious. M. R. James (1862–1936) was Provost of Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and a distinguished medieval scholar — antiquarian interests that shaped his ghost stories as much as his day job. Go to get the full notes here:

People in this episode

Host: Tony Walker

Topics covered

• ghost stories
• dolls' houses
• Gothic fiction
• M R James
• collecting
• supernatural

Keywords

• haunted dolls' house
• M R James
• ghost story
• Gothic
• supernatural
• collecting
• antiquarian

Sponsors

Gavin Critchley

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Empire Review

Books & works: The Haunted Dolls House, A Warning to the Curious

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